In Colorado, Get-Out-the-Vote Canvassers Have Already Gotten Out a Lot of Votes

On a darkened street in northeast Denver, the wheels of a black Chevy Malibu crunched over the fallen leaves as it backed slowly out of a modest garage. Then it jerked to a stop, and the window slid down. "You scared the crap out of me!" yelped the driver. Gabe Cohen, a volunteer canvasser for the Obama reelect, smiled apologetically in the headlights. "I’m from the president’s campaign, and I just wanted to see if you’ve had the chance to vote yet," he said. I thought she was going to flip out. But instead, she smiled.

"Oh yeah, definitely," she said, flipping her hand dismissively. Cohen approached with his clipboard and verified that she was the voter his bar-coded walk packet said lived at that house. She was. And her husband? "Yep, he voted, too. I can’t believe we’re still on the list," the driver said, her car still half backed out into the street. Cohen explained that the record of the couple’s returned ballots probably hadn’t yet percolated through the Secretary of State’s office and back into the campaign’s database. He made a quick notation. They wished each other well and the driver sped off.

It was like that at every home we visited: in various accents and with differing levels of cheeriness, voter after voter reported that yes, he’d already voted, and so had the other adults in the house. (Okay, not the Jehovah’s Witnesses. They said they had voted for The Heavenly Father long ago. But they were literally the only exception.) Election Day often feels strange because there’s so little to actually see, and this year you get the feeling that it’s on the verge of disappearing altogether. In Colorado, where early in-person voting and vote-by-mail are hugely popular, campaigners estimate that half the electorate will have cast ballots before today. And while that certainly means less hurly-burly for us observers to enjoy at polling places and the like, it allows a well-organized campaign to get absurdly surgical about its turnout operation.

As I tagged along with Cohen and his canvassing partner, Sally, I noticed that we were passing houses with Obama yard signs and not stopping to knock; it was only after half an hour that I realized that these were homes that had been crossed off the list as a result of previous nights’ rounds. When volunteers head out down Worchester Street this morning, their list will be even smaller than Gabe and Sally’s—essentially just a handful of houses to visit (and, if necessary re-visit) to dislodge preoccupied supporters. The canvassers’ approach is so routine-seeming, and the targets so used to frequent drop-ins, that as the two volunteers made their way through the dark, swinging flashlights back and forth to the see the house numbers, I found myself thinking of the nurses at summer camp who would come around at night to make sure that campers had taken their meds.

The fact that the Obama partisans in this quiet enclave have voted in such a steady drizzle is due in large part, Cohen said, to the campaign’s "neighborhood teams" model, which puts small handfuls of volunteers in charge of canvassing their own little patches of battleground America. Cohen would know: neighborhood teams grew out of the approach he took here during the 2008 primaries when he was Colorado Caucus Director. (Before helping to oversee Pennsylvania in the general election, he served briefly as Wyoming State Director, where he presided over the happy, slightly kooky Cheyenne office I wrote about recently. We met there and have kept up.)

"We had a tiny staff in Colorado," he recalled, walking toward the next house on his list. "But we had a really big email list for the state, and we realized that if we just got everyone on the list to caucus, we’d be almost there. So we said to each staffer, your only job is to find precinct captains. Because caucusing can be daunting, and our supporters will be much more likely to do it if someone on their block, someone they know, says ’you’re coming with me.’" The campaign went on to toy with that model of empowerment throughout the first campaign, ultimately formalizing the program for the reelect.

It isn’t as touchy-feely as it sounds: earlier yesterday I met a neighborhood team leader in Lakewood who, in the middle of animatedly describing her turf to me, abruptly cut herself off. "Excuse me," she said. "It’s 2:00 p.m. and I have to report my numbers to headquarters."

For his part, Cohen seemed tickled to be a cog in a system he helped to beta-test. Besides which, staying behind at business school while the final week of the campaign played out didn’t seem like much of option. Like so many other ’08 vets, he put his real-world responsibilities on hold to help close out what he and his teammates always saw as a years-long project. He shook his head at the thought missing this. "I’d be going crazy," he said, and headed up another walkway.

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